Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures (robonrome)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Aquarius (Aqr) · Contains: Helix Nebula · NGC 7293

Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures, robonrome

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Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures

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Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures

Viable targets in short supply in my cramped backyard at the moment... so back to another old faithful. The Helix.

I am running with reducer so fairly fast at F4.5 and wanted to try longer 10min subs to see if I could tease out a bit more of the faint nebulosity around the "eye".

The CEM40 (running a hair under its max capacity of 18kg/40lb) has impressed me here. Having it mounted on the iOptron tripier helps; I havent really lost any subs due to it despite 10m exposures. Typically I'm getting 0.7-0.8 arcsecond RMS and often better... and with RA and Dec very similar get rounder stars than I was with the CEM70.

I took well over 30 hours over 5 nights (and that's after obviousl rejections from cloud loss and one run of misfocussed). Mostly Ha and OIII, but a couple hours of SII the last night.

As part of APP stacking I further culled these further to around 26 hours worth of subs, but ended up not using the SII (not much there for the noise added), so this is around 24 hours total in the end.

Combined in Startools as HOO, but processed using SHO colour presets.

I feel the 10min subs helped a little with faint detail, bit probably detracts a bit on fine detail and more subs are seeing affected...may try this process again after a harsher prune of subs to maybe best 15hours... but for now, here it is.

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Description: slight saturation and core contrast boost

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Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures

Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures

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Helix Nebula - going a little deeper with 10min exposures

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